Golden Rendezvous ( Nuclear Terror )

It's not that great a movie to start with but the Australian ALL REGIONS dvd from Umbrella Entertainment is a total piece of junk. The print is a cropped full screen image taken directly from an old VHS videotape... an ex-rental tape because it was never released down here commercially. Tape damage is shamelessly on display as the movie plays out. To add insult to injury, the colour is faded and the picture is soft. Don't waste your money here.. it's a dead loss! Also tread carefully with the same company's "Killer Force" (aka "The Diamond Mercinaries"). That too is a full frame picture transferred from an ex-rental dvd.

This might well have been a decent film, but in this release it is just appallingly presented.
Plot wise, this is a fairly straightforward adaptation of the MacLean novel, which tells the tale of the good ship Caribbean Star, on which the First Officer has to investigate some mysterious disappearances and murders, which erupt into a more overt threat to the crew and her varied elite passengers as the story rolls on. Some liberties have been taken to add some action scenes - mostly to replace scenes in the book which were largely first person narrative. A few (superfluous) characters have been added and some radically altered, but somehow in the process all of them have been somehow made entirely bland and one dimensional. In particular, the plot twist of MacLean's novel has been altered to shoehorn in some action which is in fact quite predictable - workmanlike in its delivery rather than executed with panache. Now, Alistair MacLean was perhaps not best known for his plots necessarily, but he was a master of description combined with a marvelously dry and self deprecating wit, and somehow that depth of colour is washed out here, both literally and figuratively. It's actually a pretty good cast - Richard Harris as the hero, Gordon Jackson as the ships doctor, John Vernon (wasted) as the bad guy, David Janssen and even Burgess Meredith (as a character not appearing in the book). In fact almost all of the cast is played by well known actors of the time, but taken when they were clearly not at their best... certainly Richard Harris looks like he is walking around filling the shoes of the lead just to pay his bar bill, and adds none of the dry humour that other actors such as Richard Burton, Robert Shaw or even Barry Newman for crying out loud, have brought to MacLean roles. The lady who implausibly starts to fall for Richard Harris' charms is played by the impossibly long legged Ann Turkel (Cassandra Crossing [DVD] [1977])... well, I say implausibly and yet she and Harris were married in real life.
So on the plus side, we have much of the story from one of MacLean's most popular novels - at best it starts in the same place and finishes in the same place, even if it takes a different path in places to get there, there is some action and there are interesting actors. It also appears to have been genuinely shot on board a ship. On the minus side, everyone, and i mean everyone, under-performs.. the acting is flat to say the least. And we have an idiosyncratic score from synth wizard Jeff Wayne - this at best is going to divide opinion. At the beginning this made me groan with despair, it was so out of place.. but as the movie continued, the worst excesses were kept at bay, and only served to propel some action scenes along, which after all is what a score is meant to do - so I don't have too much beef with it.
Final note should be made of the one factor which overrides all of this opinion.. if I have described a passable 3 star movie above, this edition presents it in the Australian version which has been clearly copied from a VHS - I'm not kidding. You can actually see the tell tale flickering in places, so it's not even a good VHS copy. The colours washed out, the sound warbly - it's dodgy to say the least, and pushes this well down into 1 or 2 star territory. I'd avoid until they give it a proper release some time, if they ever do.
Summary: Decent story, passable action, mediocre direction, awful acting, miserable presentation.

The blurb states its loosely based on Alastair MacLean's novel and that's about right. Loosely indeed. The character names are similar and the setting in the same region, but oh, what have the screenwriters done? The overall premise is that mercenaries are hired by an unknown person to hijack gold bullion on a US treasury ship (hence the title), but if you want a more mature and sensible plot, read the book. I get tired of Hollywood scriptwriters treating us all like mindless idiots who'll happily accept any implausable rubbish. Please write a plot that works, not one that has its roots in a 5 year old's picture book.

One character that really irritated me was the new purser, the Welsh fellow whose name escapes me. It appeared from how the film developed that he was involved with the plot, but ultimately he was portrayed as a red herring. A complete waste of time. Agatha Christie this was not. More like Tony Christie.

It was a waste of Richard Harris' talent and too much time was taken up with the pointless casino games and the attendant retirees waiting to die. Once again a potential good story fouled up by unimaginative and talentless scriptwriters. Someone shoot the damned lot.